


Dancing With the Tiger

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Erotica, Fantasy, M/M, mystrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 01:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1799986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ok. Last bit of this for at least a little while: fantasy world based on the work I did for "The Schattenfreunde." This is the result of a dialogue I was having with dormiensa.</p><p>The intent is to try to describe sensuality and foreplay between shapeshifters without evoking bestiality. Animals are so sensual and tactile....and to be friends/partners with a shifter would involve dealing with them in both human and animal form. There would seem, to me, to be times that would be erotic and sensual, if not explicitly sexual, and would be foreplay, if not sex play. Trying to write that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing With the Tiger

 

He had no shift form to match Mycroft’s tiger. Instead, quite unusually, he went straight from the smaller forms to his gryphon, from dog to mythic monster in one stunning leap of mass that flew in the face of standard shifters’ norms. It was more common to either start big out of natural talent, as Mycroft had, or to have to work your way up. He knew that for Mycroft the challenge had been working his way down in size, going from the tiger down in steps, until at last he’d mastered the dainty, diminutive merlin that was his current extreme. Not that Lestrade expected his friend and partner to stop there. Someday Mike would no doubt learn to dance a mouse, or a beetle, or a wren. Mike liked pushing the boundaries, mastering the extremes. Someday he’d no doubt also dance a sperm whale, just to prove he could.

Lestrade wasn’t as obsessed. He had a range of shapes that served him well, with the gryphon usually more a matter of bragging rights and delight than any real necessity. His fox and owl and mixed-breed dog served him better. If he took another form, he thought he’d learn to dance a pigeon—ubiquitous, practical, invisible to most city dwellers.

Still, he had nothing to match the tiger. When they sparred, he’d just jump up to the gryphon. When they danced the far more peaceful, placid _tao qi*_ together, Lestrade would revert to his human form most of the time, when Mycroft danced his massive feline self.

He loved being human beside that beast—loved it in practice, and loved it as much when Mike would wear the form casually during time together. It made silence easy, stripping away any fear he might have that he wasn’t filling the air with sound to satisfy a human expecting to be talked to. Not that he couldn’t have talked to Mike in that form…he just didn’t feel the same need he sometimes did when the other man wore his human body.

He and the tiger would lounge together—in the sun on a bright day. Beside the fire at night, Lestrade using the big cat as a back brace, alternating between dozing and reading. Or they’d walk around Mycroft’s estate, over the green fields, through the woods—pine and oak. He remembered one day when Mycroft had caught him around the waist with a snatch of one forepaw, and tipped him solidly into a bed of pine-needles, sprawling beside him to lick his hair with a coarse, scraping tongue.

Sometimes they stood in the great hall of the country house…

Mycroft would hook a paw around Lestrade, pull him close, press his face against Lestrade’s chest, and purr—a deep, creaking, pulsing sound, stopping and starting, heavy and happy as it thundered through Lestrade’s bones.** Those times they’d melt downward, coming to rest on the thick carpet, and Lestrade would scratch behind Mycroft’s ears, rub under his chin, stroke those long striped flanks, slowly reducing the big cat to supine bliss. Mycroft was such a cat, at those times. He’d loll and purr and roll on his back.

Sometimes, then, he’d hook a paw around Lestrade and hold him close, like a cat grabbing a catnip mouse. He’d rub his face on Lestrade’s hair. He’d huff and grumble and sigh…

Sometimes he’d shift, then, and Lestrade would find himself holding his lover, slim and tall and as freckled as the tiger was striped. Mycroft, still drunk on the joy of the tiger.

It was, Lestrade supposed, a very peculiar form of foreplay. But, he had to admit, it was one he cherished. To the end of his days he’d have the sense memory of a happy tiger melting beneath his stroking hands…melting into human love, and reaching up for a kiss.

Sometimes Lestrade considered trying to develop a size-match for the tiger. Sometimes.

But then he’d think, no, and cherish the knowledge that whenever Mycroft danced his tiger, Lestrade would be there inviting him to come back and dance as a man.

 

* _Tao qi_ = Path of Spirit/Energy/Power  Similar to the idea of t’ai chi ch’uan, but a pattern aimed at training shapers, working through various postures and positions for different body types, but also focusing on transformation while working the patterns. There’s a progression of transformations, and no one—no one on record—has ever had so many forms as to be able to work the entire range. It’s common to either substitute one’s human form or one can’t actually satisfy.

**There is an argument whether tigers and lions can purr, or not. They do have differently shaped hyoid bones than do smaller cats. That said, as nearly as I can determine I think those who say they can win the fight, as those who say no seem to be fussily insisting on a rather specific definition of purring that involves being able to purr on the in-breath and the out-breath equally, rather than just the out-breath. I have made Mycroft’s purr stop-start to take that reduced ability into account, while allowing for a sound that is apparently still represented to some degree and a behavior that is in some sense observed. 


End file.
